Mary Kay Letourneau’s release from a Washington jail last week was partly greeted with a continuation of the romantic notions that were initially expressed when she was first imprisoned for second degree child rape.
Now forty-two years of age, Letourneau became movie of the week material in 1997 when her sexual relationship with a 12-year-old former student, Vili Fualaau, was exposed.
Unusually for a case relating to an adult involved with a minor there has been a preoccupation with Letourneau’s “love” for Fualaau and whether it will endure.
Who magazine informed us recently that “friends say she’s still in love with (him)”, while Gregg Olsen, author of If Loving You is Wrong*, told The Sydney Morning Herald many people see this as a love story and want to see them together”.
Olsen maintains Letourneau has a vested interest in claiming her actions were motivated by the heart, but what makes people like “Tina” express a wish on Letourneau’s website for the pair to marry sometime in the future?
Since they had an active sex life which was carried out in locations such as the school gym, the union could be understood as having been driven mostly by lust and a self-centred desire to engage in dangerous and forbidden behaviour regardless of the consequences.
Perhaps Letourneau justified it as her chance to rebel against her ultra-right wing parents, an unfaithful husband and what it means to be a wife and “mom”.
Apparently, she will be offering an ‘explanation’ soon; however, if past comments are still a guide she sees her actions as adulterous rather than abusive.
In a much reprinted photograph of Letourneau and Fualaau, in which she looks at him sideways and smiles, she comes off like a besotted teenager and not a grown-up, while he looks too young to be getting that gaze from a woman.
Contrary to what a contributor on www.marykayletourneau.com believes, even if they were in love Letourneau had a choice and could have ended the association when it became erotically charged and before it involved sex.
The “love” rationalisation and the idea Fualaau was the “predator” as one web columnist alleges allows notions about what attractive, white, middle-class mothers are capable of and general attitudes about men, women, class and race to go unchallenged.
Sean Baker, whose Ph.D. studies at the University of Washington focussed on the case, contends that “by locating Letourneau into an “appropriate” and constructed gender role, the media assisted in the manufacturing and upholding of our culture by rectifying counter intuitive events”.
It can be imagined what angles would have been taken if Letourneau had been the poor Samoan-American and Fualaau a white boy from the nice side of town or if their genders had been reversed (although a Melbourne man recently received compensation for stress after losing his teaching position because he had taken up with a female student).
The lack of curiosity about Fualaau’s plight might be explained by prejudices about the survival instincts and supposed immorality of the working-class or by the denial of their feelings, but as Olsen argues “his life has been profoundly impacted by what she did”.
So has his mother’s; she has custody of the children that resulted from the liaison.
It is important to acknowledge that many women who are incarcerated are drug-addicted (90% according to Susan Nadler in the stupidly titled Good Girls Gone Bad) and have been victims of sexual and/or physical abuse, but we also have to concede some females behave badly without extenuating reasons, just like some men do.
Women gain little by being viewed as inherently good and always acting for noble reasons like love.
We will have to wait and see what Letourneau has to add to her previous self-serving comments about the ‘affair’.
*The book presumably takes its name from the song of the same name, which contains lyrics that Letourneau might empathise with:
If bearing the way I feel for you
Is committing a crime
Am I breaking the law
Devoting myself to you?
You are the hope my dreams are built on
The reason for my happiness
You’re my everything and so much more
You’re the air I breath
My fantasy
Speaking of abuse, after I posted this piece I witnessed a man screaming really awful stuff at a child I presume was his son in the mall at Fortitude Valley. Such an incident reminds that verbal abuse is also incredibly destructive and can become deeply internalised. How is that little boy supposed to grow up feeling good about himself when he is told he is a “f****** c***” by a man who is supposed to be his dominant role model?
Suffice to say I wish I had done something, although I have no idea what I could have.
Darlene recommends GeekGirl for reading enjoyment.